History

”In 1786, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Tripoli. Shores of Tripoli. Ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery. We estimate 1.5 million… pic.twitter.com/aKbwf8TRLO

— Taya (@travelingflying) February 16, 2026

 

An Insight

This is fabulous.

Gibbon’s ‘book is one of the most sustained accounts of Rome’s cosmopolitan imperial order, portraying the Roman Empire at its height as a political entity defined not by ethnicity or origin, but by law, citizenship, and participation in a universal civil…

— Robert Lyman 🇺🇦 (@robert_lyman) February 15, 2026

 

I see wonderful things

A fossil stingray with small fish - Green River, Wyoming. Sotheby's pic.twitter.com/XSAmaE0k9S

— Archaeology & Art (@archaeologyart) February 16, 2026

 

Offbeat Humor

Do you think the guy that coined the term "one hit wonder" ever came up with any other popular phrases?

— Lloyd Legalist (@LloydLegalist) February 22, 2026

 

Data Talks

It was pretty reasonable for The Treasury to assume that the graduate premium would stay up in the UK as we added more graduates. The graduate premium actually went up in the USA and all of its major cities. And in London. https://t.co/crbGJk4RA3 pic.twitter.com/qEVyTdJiXn

— Tom Forth (@thomasforth) February 15, 2026

 

Stormy Sea off Alexandria, 1923 by Ernst Karl Eugen Koerner

Stormy Sea off Alexandria, 1923 by Ernst Karl Eugen Koerner (Poland/Germany, 1846-1927)

Click to enlarge.

We don’t know what we believe until we’re asked

Heh.  I have a post somewhere way back towards the beginning of Thingfinder in 2007 expressing this precise sentiment - writing in order to test my thinking.  

We have Schrödinger’s opinions: we don’t know what we believe until we’re asked. This is why we should write even when chatbots can write for us; interrogating yourself on the page is how you learn what you think and realize who you are.

— Gurwinder (@G_S_Bhogal) March 12, 2026

I also had the additional objective to create a record for myself to see how my thinking and understanding of things evolved over time.   

Theories of economic development

From NOTE TO SELF: All of the Currently Live Theories of the Causes of the "European Miracle"

by Brad DeLong.  The subheading is & was the “European Miracle” 800-1914, 1492-1914, 1689-1914, or 1776-1914?...

As he notes, "of course, highly overlapping"

Local geography & resources (coal, land, disease environment):

Jared Diamond, Kenneth Pomeranz, Robert Allen, Paul Bairoch, Fernand Braudel, Mark Koyama & Jared Rubin, Eric Jones, Leonid Grinin & Andrey Korotayev

Institutions, property rights & representative government:

Douglass North & Robert Thomas, Daron Acemoglu–Simon Johnson–James Robinson, Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, Gary Cox, DeLong & Shleifer, Robert Brenner, Chris Isett, Eric Jones

Political fragmentation, competition & “market for ideas”:

Jared Diamond, Joel Mokyr, Niall Ferguson, Eric Jones, James Belich, Mark Koyama, Tuan-Hwee Sng, De la Croix–Doepke–Mokyr (guilds/journeymen)

Culture, religion & “WEIRD” psychology / Protestant ethic:

Max Weber, David Landes, Deirdre McCloskey, Joseph Henrich, Larry Siedentop, Nathan Rosenberg & L.E. Birdzell, Timur Kuran (for Islamic-world contrast), Justin Yifu Lin, Yasheng Huang, Eric Jones

High-wage economy & inducement mechanisms (wages, prices, factor prices):

Robert Allen, Gregory Clark, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Stephen Broadberry, Bishnupriya Gupta, Allen–Bassino–Ma–Moll-Murata–van Zanden

New World, coal, & “accidents” (California school/contingency):

Kenneth Pomeranz, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Jack Goldstone, Andre Gunder Frank, John Hobson, Jeffrey Williamson, Diego Comin, Acemoglu–Zilibotti (risk/diversification)

Colonialism, slavery, & deindustrialization at the periphery:

Eric Williams, Paul Bairoch, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Jeffrey Williamson, Tirthankar Roy (partly revisionist), Daron Acemoglu et al. (institutional twist), James Walvin

Human capital, knowledge transmission, & guilds:

De la Croix–Doepke–Mokyr (guilds/journeymanship), Bas van Bavel & coauthors (capital goods diffusion), Timur Kuran (Islamic legal forms

& firms), Mark Dincecco (state capacity & public finance)

Demography, Black Death, & Malthusian-escape dynamics:

James Belich, Oded Galor, Mark Koyama & coauthors, David Weir, Allen/Bairoch/van Zanden on wages, demography,

& living standards

Globalization, trade structure & core–periphery dynamics (19th c. “Big Bang”):

Kevin O’Rourke, Jeffrey Williamson, Guillaume Daudin, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Paul Bairoch, Leonid Grinin & Andrey Korotayev

Aristocrats by Keith Douglas

From The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas, edited by Desmond Graham.  

Aristocrats

by Keith Douglas

The noble horse with courage in his eye, 

clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst: 

away fly the images of the shires

but he puts the pipe back in his mouth.

Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88

it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance.

I saw him crawling on the sand, he said 

It’s most unfair, they’ve shot my foot off.

How can I live among this gentle

obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep ?

Unicorns, almost,

for they are fading into two legends

in which their stupidity and chivalry

are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal.

These plains were their cricket pitch

and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences 

brought down some of the runners. Here then 

under the stones and earth they dispose themselves, 

I think with their famous unconcern.

It is not gunfire I hear, but a hunting horn.

Tunisia

1943

The poem from which this stanza is taken, originally entitled `Aristocrats', was written by Keith Douglas in Tunisia in 1943. It was occasioned by the death, on active service, of Lt. Col. J. D. Player, who left £3,000 to the Beaufort Hunt, and also directed that the incumbent of the living in his gift should be 'a man who approves of hunting, shooting, and all manly sports, which are the backbone of the nation.' (Desmond Graham (ed.), Keith Douglas: Complete Poems (1978), p. 139.) 

Remember to be humble about how small a portion is known compared to what could be known.

Well, good grief!  There is always something new to be learned.

I am increasingly disillusioned with my reach on X, so I am writing about stuff I like: English idioms. From 1188 to 1902 the Old Bailey Crown Court was attached to Newgate Prison.

The condemned men were taken by horse and cart to Tyburn, modern day Marble Arch, to be hung.… pic.twitter.com/b6XKIEKYsb

— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) March 13, 2026

His is an interesting observation on the origins of a couple of idioms.

That is not what has shaken me.

Marble Arch is the present day site of the old Tyburn Gallows, London's primary execution spot from 1196 until 1783?

I have lived in England on four occasions totaling six years from the mid 1960's onwards.  I have family there, including in London.  I have spent hundreds, if not thousands of days in London on business and leisure.  My sister had an apartment for a couple of years on Edgware Road not five or ten minutes from Marble Arch.  I have walked, ridden, and driven by Marble Arch thousands of times.  And yes, with tremendous trepidation, I have bicycled the roundabout around Marble Arch on more than one occasion as a teen courier.  

How on earth did I not know that it used to be Tyburn Gallows?

I read voluminously.  Maybe it just got crowded out.

I am no longer a youth.  Maybe I just forgot it.

Both seem unlikely.

My suspicion is that I knew that Marble Arch was the location of executions when I was anywhere up to my late teens but that the name Tyburn did not then have significance to me.  

My knowledge of the historical salience of Tyburn only came later with much deeper reading of English history.  I suspect that at different times I have known that Marble Arch was the site of executions and I must have even known that it used to be Tyburn Gallows but that by the time I focused on Tyburn Gallows from an historical reading perspective, I had forgotten the Marble Arch connection and never reconnected the two facts.  

It is a tissue thin rationale but I'll go with it.  And remember to be humble about how small a portion is known compared to what could be known.